A Mysterious And Surreal Botanical Art Exhibition At Artbox

Media release – March 25, 2013

A Mysterious And Surreal Botanical Art Exhibition At Artbox In Christchurch Opens Next Month

Enter Frantic Orchard, a botanical doorway into the realm of the subconscious – to nature mysterious and surreal.

This is an art exhibition opening next month by emerging New Zealand artist Rebecca Harris at Christchurch’s new ArtBox site which was in the red zone and is now part of the reviving central business district (CBD).

There is a mix of beauty and madness here and a certain freedom in its discovery in Harris’s exhibition works.

``I am having this exhibition here because I think the ArtBox initiative is a valuable asset to Christchurch. Arts are a important in a community and I want to be involved in exhibiting/volunteering at the Artbox. It is situated on the corner of Madras and St Asaph Streets, the site of the old Southlander Tavern.

``The ArtBox project is a unique community collaboration, led by CPIT along with industry partners dedicated to providing temporary exhibition and retail spaces for the arts community in Christchurch. ArtBox aims to help revitalise the city's heart by providing a space where people can meet, socialise and participate in the arts.

``For my exhibition, viewers will be greeted by the sublime: haunted thickets of tree fern and manuka forests, shadowed woods and tumbling floral beds – bejewelled and bathed in atmosphere. Within the surreal spectacle of tangled botanicals' finding freedom and form in the lofty realms of the artist’s mood filled skies, `life within life’ seems irrepressible and potent.’’

Harris, who has a Masters art degree from the University of Canterbury, finds voice through nature, her own symbolist sensibilities and her affinity with the symbolist epoch. Sharing their fascination with the unseen aspects of human experience, she has abandoned the narrative quality of her tightly painted realist dreamscapes for a more painterly and suggestive approach.

She now paints for our senses, to induce a state of synaesthesia, so we might share her epiphany, shudder from the rain, hear the stretch and groan of life before us, and taste the richness of life's colour.

Botanical elements have become more prominent in her visual vocabulary. Adding to the psychological drama, they unfurl as dark protagonists: fertile, figuratively suggestive, bizarre and strangely beautiful. A sense of presence pervades; each painting becomes a portrait, an evocation of feeling.

It is Harris’s sensitivity and subjectivity that calibrate in her painting. Combined with her love and appreciation for nature’s wildness, its vulnerability and imperfect beauty, her images become a self-made refuge of “living pillars”.

For Harris, nature proffers a key to the imagination and experience. Be it urban greenery of public parks, curbside gardens reaching out across the broken foot-path, or a lone daisy, each is an experience, fragmented reminders of secret places and childhood years spent in the mysterious and magical splendour of Golden Bay. Each moment is soulfully imprinted and creatively processed in her imagery.

ENDS

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